This is all noise. The leaders of these companies are flip-flopping to whatever sounds best for their current agenda - hiring, fundraising, pre-IPO, etc.

The only thing that matters is if LLMs with sufficient scaling can become frontier AI researchers kicking off the exponential. Everything else is transient noise.

Dumbasses the lot of them.

Took that nonsense to Capitol Hill, trying to tell a bunch of politicians who knew damn well they are only there as long as they can keep their voters employed. They could have asked their own AI what happens when employment reaches 40-50%. Hint: it's never good. They were going to become another problem the government had to solve.

Also, UBI is non-starter no matter what Sam Altman believes.

> The only thing that matters is if LLMs with sufficient scaling can become frontier AI researchers kicking off the exponential. Everything else is transient

As long as the term “AI” means by-and-large LLMs with additional features sprinkled on top, the answer is no. More likely (without careful vetting by the folks aggregating these models) is that the quality will go down as more and more AI-generated output gets subsumed into these models.

Even without that particular problem, LLMs-as-AI can only give us probabilistic outputs based on inputs; and by definition they’re reliant on humans to provide the training data for their model. Without specialized knowledge or training on that knowledge (And even with it, viz. Meta’s engineering), we don’t have to worry about AI itself. We do have to worry what investors who are looking for outsized returns will do to get those returns, job market be damned.

The problem for us isn’t that AI will take our jobs; it’s that snake-oil salesmen can sell the idea that AI will take our jobs, investors buy into it, companies try it, fire their folks, the snake-oil salesmen IPOs, the companies that bought into this idea implode in some form or fashion, and the salesmen have already taken the money and ran. Of course, we still lose our jobs, but maybe (!) we get them back when this all fails?

After watching the AI roll out for a couple years now I'm much more confident that it's just a scam. There is no net positive ROI on AI. It's not good enough, and the "mass job destruction" scenario offsets any marginal gains by eliminating the market for basically all products. That doesn't mean that mediocre C-suites won't try but it only takes 1-2 quarters to feel the burn and back track.

Of course they have. Fewer developers means fewer tokens sold.

Until AI no longer needs human supervision, it's more profitable to tax as many employees as possible.

I kind of wish there was a way to flip the script on the companies that gave up on humans and tried to switch to AI. Make them suffer for their idiocy in the same way that workers suffered or continue to suffer.

If that makes me a bad person, fine. If a few CEO's wind up working at 7-11 to make rent money, all the better.

Yet layoffs excused by AI (expenses or claimed productivity gains) are continuing by the thousands each day, so... not sure what this is based on.

The ultimate irony here is that the biggest jobs wipeout most likely to happen now is when all these “AI exploration lab” type teams that every company quickly created are blown up.

Most, if not nearly all, of these teams have little to show ROI wise and the music on the AI bubble is slowing dramatically. They went from seemingly unlimited budgets and headcount when CEOs said “get me some of that AI” to some really uncomfortable scenes playing out know as the same CEOs realize this has cost a fortune with little to show for it.

In case anyone else read the "flipped on" as "flipped the switch on" rather than "reversed course on", no, it's the latter.

big doubts about this. AI is absolutely doing a number on software jobs. Look at some of the SWE positions even something that used to be seen beneath it like QA or database manager etc, it has easily tens of thousands of applicans in months

there is an oversupply of SWE and a dwindling supply of jobs which pushes wages down

article misses an important point that these big tech companies are all listed on the public market, any narrative about their decisions should weigh that reality and why suddenly its being disseminated.

Remember it was reported that OpenAI didn't think that ChatGPT would be successful? OpenAI thought that ChatGPT was yet another toy before its launch. Yet once ChatGPT became an overnight success, Altman started to talk about how AI would be dangerous, how it would displace or even replace jobs. In contrast, Amodei seemed to always believe in what he said. So, can we say that Altman is a opportunistic businessman, and Amodei is a cult leader?